The present application is directed to a medicine container for holding medicine, and more particularly, to a medicine container with an orientation sensor that provides for accurate sensing an amount of medicine.
Various prior art medicine containers have been equipped to measure an amount of medicine that has been taken by a user and thus how much medicine is in the container. However, these containers have been plagued with issues.
These other medicine containers with sensors are used in an attempt to detect medicine usage. However, for accurate usage detection, the containers must be placed in a particular orientation, such as in an upright position with a bottom of the container positioned on a shelf or counter. If the containers are not in this particular orientation, the data sensed by the sensors is inaccurate. The sensors are not configured to determine whether the container is in the proper orientation. The sensors merely assume that the container is in the proper orientation at the time of measuring the data.
Other sensors have been used to detect specific actions involving the container. One embodiment includes a sensor that detects when a cap has been removed from a body of the container. The systems are configured to assume that this removal equates to the user taking their expected dosage of the medicine. However, this assumption is often wrong and results in poor medicine usage determinations. A user may open the container for a number of other reasons, including when the user opens the cap to check how much medicine is remaining and when the user inadvertently removes the cap.
These various sensor configurations are ineffective in accurately monitoring the medicine remaining the container and thus the medicine usage by the user. When this information is used to determine compliance by a particular user, the data is often completely off-base. Further, if an entire monitoring system such as that used by an insurance company or pharmaceutical manufacturer is based on information determined in these manners, the system is completely unreliable.